Out of the Margins

John Haber
in New York City

Melvin Edwards, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and Black Abstraction

Kianja Strobert and Sherrill Roland

This has been a time of rediscovery for artists too long on the margins. Melvin Edwards and Barbara Chase-Riboud are reminders to treat African Americans as critical to the mainstream, even were the followers of Donald J. Trump not determined to shut people of color out.

Both are grounded in Modernism and resolutely abstract. Yet they in turn ground Modernism in a broader history, from slavery to Malcolm X. They appeared in "Witness," a show about the 1964 Civil Rights Act at the Brooklyn Museum, and both were in their mid-twenties at its passage. Fifty years later they are still bearing witness and still affording models for others, in gallery exhibitions on a scale that a museum would envy, only much of what they see lies within. As a postscript, a generation later Kianja Strobert asks to be resolutely modern, while Sherrill Roland builds on Minimalism and text art. It gives their art access to the personal and the political.

Still bearing witness

Melvin Edwards and Barbara Chase-Riboud have both worked on public monuments, although Covid-19 has deferred an outdoor showcase for Edwards, and Chase-Riboud also intends her series as sculpture for its own sake. Edwards completed his Homage to Poet Léon-Gontran Damas in 1981, for the State University of New York at Purchase. Damas, a founder of the Négritude movement of the 1930s, sought to affirm black identity in opposition to French colonialism. The monument's circle, touched by uprights of welded steel, quite literally looks to Africa, taking its orientation from the sun. And his latest show attests to over forty years of engagement with Africa, in his travels and with a studio in Senegal since 2000. He incorporates machetes and shackles in small constructions hung from the wall spanning fifteen years alone.

Chase-Riboud, too, exhibits two broad bodies of work. Pencil sketches from 1997 proposed public monuments, while steles of bundled silk and bronze from roughly 2007 pay tribute to Malcolm X—as do bolder and larger monuments woven and cast for a second show three years later, in 2017. A patina of black, red, or gold brings a shine to fine threads and thickly knotted cords, which mask the work's support. Other steles take fabric as their subject as well as material, with a majestic robe for Chairman Mao or the stripes of a golden flag. She calls the earlier of her two shows "One Million Kilometers of Silk." I lost count, but I can well believe it.

Both remain close, too, to late Modernism, much like another African American sculptor, Richard Hunt. Edwards relies on the same processes as Mark di Suvero. He also shares with di Suvero, a founder of Socrates Sculpture Park in Astoria, Queens, a dedication to communities. For all his allusions to Africa and the slave trade, his materials belong to urban America as well. One recent series clusters its welded parts at the center of four-by-four wire grids, another on disks curving outward like hubcaps. They relate both to formalism and to the streets.

Chase-Riboud shares her dark mysteries with white artists herself, like the steles and Surrealism of Louise Nevelson or the craft and knotted fabric of Sheila Hicks—and she has lived in France for much of her career while casting bronze in Italy. Does she assert a woman's pride as well as an African American's in exile? Does all that blood red and shimmering gold have something to do with sex? A writer as well as a sculptor, she is best known for a novel about Sally Hemmings, Thomas Jefferson's mistress and slave. And the subjects of those unfinished monuments run to the Marquis de Sade along with Nelson Mandela. Signs of bondage have more than one history.

Among the LA artists in "Now Dig This" in 2013 at MoMA PS1, Edwards was at his most abstract. Yet the title of his contribution alluded to the Watts rebellion. Chase-Riboud has her share of white role models, with proposed monuments to Lady Macbeth and Oscar Wilde as well as Malcolm X. Yet her overpowering sensuality also parallels African totems in women's shoes for Willie Cole. Their reshaping of materials brings Edwards and Chase-Riboud closer to one another as well. Her silk takes on the solidity of his steel as if it were the work's base, while he called a work from 1966 Cotton Hang-Up.

The question keeps recurring: is there a uniquely black abstraction, and is it then any less black or any less abstract? These artists move easily between Post-Minimalism and the world, like Vivian Browne seeking a heritage in abstraction and Africa, with no apologies for either one. Her monuments may have no obvious relationship to their subjects, but her silk and bronze still trap one in their tangles and their shine. Artists like these and Eugene J. Martin, a painter receiving renewed attention after his death, deserve much more credit alongside their white peers. Now, at last, Chelsea takes note.

Black materials

Kianja Strobert makes abstract painting the old-fashioned way, with surfaces to die for. Her powdery blacks recall the days when artists ground their own colors—and her gold when nothing less would do. Pigment presses to the edge and then some, as an extension of her own hand. One can see her traces in lighter compositions, like finger-painting, with signs of a tabletop or a horizon line. One can see them, too, in the thickest and brightest colors, often red, their irregular outlines like an impulsive afterthought. They allow her, as one title puts it, her Archaism and Ecstasy.

Her surfaces imply a certain impulsiveness, too, in how they get started. What look like oils on canvas are works on paper, and the ground black is powdered graphite. Strobert might have started with working sketches, in pencil, and refused to let go. That refusal has led to a density of materials, practically none of them amenable to a brush. They include ink, graphite, acrylic, oil stick, and enamel, but also sand, dirt, pumice, beeswax, and bone. If they have anything in common, it is an appeal to the sense of touch.

Strobert's two dozen works the size of modest canvas date entirely since 2010. The oldest are relatively flat and bright. Some then thicken, with more powder and impasto, while others thin out, exposing paper according to the movement of her hand. The most recent add glitter, as well as the occasional title. Fifty-one smaller sheets on brown paper look more obviously like drawings. Their descending strokes rarely stick to straight lines.

Some recent work also adds imagery or words. The imagery hints at people. Still, the people probably have more to do with the artist's presence than narrative, and ampersands leave things open-ended. Even when she paints on newsprint, the result looks resolutely abstract. The text, too, appears to refer to the artistic process and emotions, as with asplinter. Maybe yet another artist has arrived—and she did exhibit among emerging artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem and in the 2012 art fairs.

Is there a distinctly black abstraction? Not necessarily, although such artists as Edwards have no trouble using formalism to assert their African American identity. For Strobert, though, the question seems hardly even an issue. She appeared in a show of conceptual art in Harlem, with a wine stain, but her primary reference point is still "action painting." Chicken bones could refer to dietary practices, but mostly they just look bare and exposed, much as the powdery graphite can look like ashes. These are surfaces to die for.

Strobert's old-fashioned exuberance makes it hard for her to stand out, amid a wealth of abstraction both derivative and conservative. For all the repeated verticals and imagery, her strength lies in neither formalism nor imaginative leaps between abstraction and dreams. Pigment matters more than compositions, and the transformations are still first and foremost of materials. They supply the discoveries, and they make one aware of someone behind their presence on paper, but are they enough? Her surprises may turn to be a part of a longer search for an artistic identity. Four years of surfaces may be only a start.

The benefits of hindsight

Sherrill Roland is guilty of hindsight bias, and he knows it. It could be the only way to look back on three years in prison for a crime that he did not commit. It could be the only way to turn those years into art, where "Hindsight Bias" is both the exhibition title and a guide to the crushing weight of experience. It could be his way to navigate the confusion of art now, including Post-Minimalism, political art, and confession. It could be his guide for the viewer who might otherwise never know how well he combines all three. If that art is also a lie, that is how it gets at the truth.

The gallery's main room has three distinct works, although keeping count is part of the challenge, too. They clamor for attention, at the risk of derisively shouting each other down. They illuminate one another and blend into a single installation as well. I started with the most modest sculpture, because it seemed easy to get a handle on it. Was I wrong? It consists of right-angled rods of square cross-section, outlining two small spaces. They come in white and bright colors, and they rest comfortably on pedestals, but creature comforts are still in doubt.

Their modular form and placement recall the high Minimalism of Donald Judd and Carl Andre, and their aspiration to architecture reaches there as well. One can see each version as a room, wide open but also a measured construction. They seem all the airier for looping around base corners, although one might have to poke a finger through the top (mentally, of course) to verify that they do not have confining acrylic or glass. And they really were once confining, for Roland, who performed in prison orange for "Fictions" at the Studio Museum in Harlem, bases them on his prison cell. And then confinement takes physical shape in the show's largest work, two cubes that meet at a corner as entire closed rooms to themselves. Here the right-angled shapes are steel plates and screws that hold it all together and, it seems, ensure that no one can enter or leave.

One room has a basketball and net, because Roland helped himself and others through those long days by organizing games, only the net is uncomfortably close to the ground. The other has transparent plastic bags for discarded cookie wrappers and the like, because winning (and maybe losing, too) had its rewards. The packaging comes with logos in cheerful colors, akin to Pop Art, but they are still trash. Last, as if to comment on their limit, clear surfaces hanging from the ceiling have harsh but slightly blurry type akin to the black text of Glenn Ligon, only in blaring red. It alternates messages, that the authorities have censored and inspected this material and so bear responsibility—and that the authorities have not done so and bear no responsibility. You can judge for yourself which version the artist knew at first hand and which is more ominous.

Still, they are also funny, not to mention heartfelt, like more text in the back room. There four layers of red text fill shallow boxes, vibrating with lost meanings. Roland swears that he is quoting letters to the mother of a daughter whom, in all those days in prison, he had never seen. They are sincere enough but totally illegible, adding to his combination of humanity and an icy chill. Maybe they have taken on new meanings with hindsight bias, but for him and not for others. He works with private matters on a public scale while playing his cards close to his chest, just as he never gets around to stating the alleged crime.

Minimalism and three years of pent-up anger call for no less. Still, their stories display hindsight bias, much like ever so many tales of redemption. You know, in retrospect someone has made it through painful times through endurance and love, and the most bitter memories are grounds for a new beginning—and, for Roland, grounds for art. People tell that story because they, too, want to hear it, and journalism (including arts journalism) eats it up. If it is a lie or a fable, art is, too, by definition. In real life, there are no beginnings out of nowhere, but art depends on continuity and open endings as well.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Melvin Edwards ran at Alexander Gray through December 13, 2014, Barbara Chase-Riboud at Michael Rosenfeld through January 10, 2015, Kianja Strobert at the Studio Museum in Harlem through March 8, 2015, and Sherrill Roland at Tanya Bonakdar through February 5, 2022. Chase-Riboud's powerful series for Malcolm X ran at her gallery through November 4, 2017. The review of Strobert first appeared in a different form in Artillery magazine. A related review looks at Chase-Riboud with Alberto Giacometti.